Zach Phillips

Summary

I wrote about a really counterintuitive aspect of “passion projects” and procrastination. The post is sort of a mess but I’ve been proving out the core idea to myself daily for… a while.

Microblog:: https://micro.zachphillips.blog/2021/02/07/the-wantmust-matrix.html

Today I had this perfect set of tasks that fit neatly into all four quadrants of what I’ll call the Want/Must Matrix.

The most counterintuitive thing is that the tasks that create the most resistance for me are those I both really must do and really want to do. 👇

Common productivity advice when you want to do something but have resistance: “Find a way to force yourself through public accountability, promises to others, etc…”

Softly/playfully, this can help, but when taken seriously, it’s the perfect recipe for procrastination.

When we procrastinate, we’re usually avoiding something that we must do in favor of something we want to do. Right?

This is exactly wrong.

We’re often avoiding the things we most want to do in favor of things we neither want nor must do. 🤦‍♂️ Why do we do this?

The most common procrastination activities are usually no more than tics disguised as Wanty or Musty or some combination. We spin artificial webs of want/must/must-want to distract ourselves from the discomfort of the friction between obligations and our true desires.

We check email ten times, organize stuff. If we play a game, we do so with a sense of duty (“just need to finish this level”). We aren’t “playing” at all. This isn’t the romantic procrastination we were promised!

Why would we do these things in lieu of what we most want?

If our obligations and true desires are perfectly in line, why wouldn’t that be advantageous? If we get to do “what we love” for “our job,” isn’t that ideal?

Ask someone who has made their “passion” into their “job” and see how smoothly it’s gone for them.

The most common explanation for this incongruity is that we’re somehow afraid of failure and so we don’t start. Sure we’re afraid of failure, but fear of failure is insignificant next to the true cause of the really bad resistance.

The big cause is adding more Must to our Wants.

The great paradox is that, if you Want to do something, adding Must to it adds resistance. The part of us that Wants (and always knows how to do the things we want, needing no help) is completely gummed up by the part of us that tries to coerce and control it.

If you think I’m talking only about work, I’m not. This applies as much to reading or playing with your kids. We have an incredible knack for making anything into an obligation, and when we do, even the thing we want most in the world becomes a massive struggle.

Our coercive/extractive cultural discourse says human behavior is “lazy” or “not lazy”. “Good” people do what they must, and “bad” people do what they want.

This doesn’t hold up. People who do the most are people who have figured out how to do what they want to do with ease.

Learning to do what we want to do is less a process of learning as it is a process of __un__learning. We already naturally know how to do what we want. My 3-year-old never needs to ask herself what she wants to do or try to motivate herself to do it.

“But your 3-year-old doesn’t have real work to do.”

Irrelevant. She begs to help with everything: dishes, cooking, picking up. She’s just not good at these things yet.

Some of the most satisfying work I ever did was cleaning a restaurant kitchen at 1AM or shoveling stone.

There’s nothing precious about the work it takes to write your book or app. It’s no different from stacking firewood or doing dishes. is just something you want to do that you’ve made so Musty that you can’t even access the part of you that wants it anymore.

All Must isn’t bad. A bit of Must can appetize Want/Play. But the Must can’t have judgment attached. “I must post a thread today” = ok. “I must post a GOOD thread today” = dead.

“This better be good.” “You’re in trouble if you miss this deadline.” Not helpful. Not once. Ever.

And the Musty voice needs to fade into background noise if you’re going to actually do/enjoy doing the thing.

The only way for that to happen reliably (Flow) is to actually stop believing that you need the Musty voice. To believe that, you’ll need evidence.

This is proving to be a pretty wide-ranging topic and I’m not going to be able to encapsulate it in one post/thread nicely the way I want to. But that’s okay, because I don’t have to do anything, and this was fun.

Summary

Today I wrote about a “zombie” series I’m playing/sketching on a pilot for. It explores free will, self-control, and culpability.

Microblog:: https://micro.zachphillips.blog/2021/02/06/filmmaking-in-public.html

I’m fascinated by the implications of free will (and whether it is in fact just the last bastion of magical thinking). The story of the Texas Tower Sniper, documented through his own writing, is unbelievably chilling.

I’m sketching out a “zombie” series that explores this. 👇

Series concept: There’s a virus that produces no felt symptoms but it removes the infected’s ability to control their rage if triggered in some way. As it spreads, it creates otherwise normal people who are walking grenades waiting for the circumstance that pulls their pin out…

My friend and colleague Jason and I discussed the opening scene of the pilot before doing some storyboarding this week in Storyboarder VR: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmJdrZLmMis

The series as currently sketched will follow investigators as they try to figure out why there are these aberrant violent crimes coming from people who don’t fit the profile.

Spoiler alert: Eventually in season one, our main sleuth discovers they have the virus.

I usually name projects before I start them, and I love naming things, but for some reason I haven’t come up with a name for this series yet (open to freely-offered suggestions). I’ll be doing this filmmaking in public. The first goal: Make the pilot in Storyboarder.

Microblog:: https://micro.zachphillips.blog/2021/02/05/the-netflix-envelope.html

Summary

I wrote about the Netflix envelope and what it can teach us about reducing friction for any kind of change.

Netflix had to make lots of good decisions to get to where they are, but the most critical—the linchpin of what is now an empire, was the design of the Netflix envelope.

To start anything new, you have to remove friction. Precisely how much you have to remove is unknowable. 👇

Whether you’re trying to sell a new thing, change a behavior, or improve the world, the question that you need to return to over and over again is “How can we make this easier? More frictionless?”

It requires sensitivity to discover the deepest, most entrenched friction.

The most difficult friction is completely hidden from us. We’ve just accepted it as reality, a la The Matrix. You won’t discover this friction through focus groups or A/B testing.

In 2006, almost no one thought they wanted a touchscreen keyboard, yet literally everyone did.

The best way to discover these hidden points of friction is to be sensitive to your own negative feelings: anger, fear, anxiety, sadness, frustration, even violence.

The most successful change agents are deeply attuned to how much—and WHY—they hate the status quo.

We need to accept these points of friction as legitimate, as solid as a law of physics. They cannot be dismissed as stupid or unreasonable.

How big a deal is it to get a stamp? Well, Netflix’s current market cap is 243 billion dollars. Finding a stamp is a pretty big deal.

The energy to push through physical or psychological friction is a finite resource like any other.

The moment the price of a barrel of oil rises above a certain threshold, legions of humans and machines instantly and violently start exploding stone to release natural gas.

If you have an intuition that something should work but it isn’t, sit quietly. Your intuition is likely right, but the solution subtler than your awareness.

One thing is certain: Force amplifies friction. It may work once or twice but it can never create sustainable change.

We need to remember: Whether we’re hawking our wares or making the world a more just, kind, and equitable place, we are the ones with the agenda. Therefore, it is incumbent upon us to make change easier for those we want to change.

It doesn’t matter how right we are.

We are surrounded by useful, potent structures that are rendered completely ineffective (or massively harmful) by minuscule points of friction.

Our politics, commerce, and change discourse is all shot through with brute force methods.

How can we make it easy to change that?

Summary

I wrote about how, while we’re stuck in these monopolist’s walled gardens, we may as well get the most out of their constraints (and some thoughts on how to do that).

Microblog:: https://micro.zachphillips.blog/2021/02/04/getting-real-value.html

As we move to destroy monopolist walled-garden “web” vampires (don’t worry, we win in the end), we can and should meanwhile use their constraints to benefit ourselves and one another.

Here are some social media platform constraints and how we might get value from them. 👇

First, Twitter (“this” proverbial “website”): 280 characters is a helpful constraint for writing, even long(ish)form threads, where each section needs to stand alone and contribute to the larger idea.

Also cool about threads: reference/discovery via different “entry points.”

Twitter also seems to be the absolute best place ever created for finding people with similar interests, no matter how niche.

Keep the original text of any tweets you care about in data that you own like a @microdotblog or your @RoamResearch graph.

The most important constraint of Twitter (that applies equally to all of these “platforms”): It’s a trash heap owned by someone who doesn’t care about you. Nothing in it matters other than being a decent human being.

To be clear: All of these platforms are owned by nihilists.

The social media companies would feed your children to piranhas if they thought it would improve Engagement™.

Don’t hang ANYTHING important on your identity as expressed through one of these platforms. It doesn’t belong to you, nor will it ever be offered for sale (to you).

A core principle in using all of these vampire platforms: As long as you’re having fun and keeping ownership of anything valuable you create, you can’t do it wrong. Use these dystopian hellscape fiefdoms as your personal playgrounds. Never take them seriously, even for a second.

Facebook Groups can be useful for finding people around a specific topic (because all forum software has failed), but for publishing, Facebook is likely the worst product ever created by mankind. Get your relationships off Facebook and into a Personal Email Newsletter (PEN).

Instagram: Nearly completely worthless. This is a company that hates photography and photographers. They mangle every photo you take and don’t even let you leverage their platform for a single good or healthy thing for yourself. They should be the first to be thrown into a fire.

That said, Instagram groupings of 10 photos (all at the same aspect ratio 🤦‍♂️ and mangled to hell by a company who hates photography) can help you edit.

Keep photos in similar groupings in Photos/Lightroom while we wait for someone to (finally) create good photo hosting.

YouTube might be the most problematic of all of the platforms precisely because it’s the one that seems to provide the most value to its meat I mean users. It got here by way of the accident of file sizes/hosting costs. Thank God podcasts skated in under the copper limbo wire.

YouTube is the most entrenched monopoly of all the vampires. I need to think more on it, but right now I think it should just be treated as Twitter for video. Always have a version NOT for YouTube, without “like/subscribe” garbage, unless it’s something you don’t care about.

I don’t have much to say about TikTok. It’s just videos of arbitrary length/orientation/aspect ratio. If you want to tell stories/jokes concisely, TikTok is great for experimenting, but you should own those videos and put them anywhere you like.

TikTok should be algorithm-only.

I’m not a gamer, so I have little to say about streaming at the moment, but I’m testing it out over the coming weeks with some filmmaking in virtual reality.

Snapchat/Instagram Stories/Facebook Stories/Fleets: These I find really interesting, because the impetus to share a moment from your day that self-destructs might in fact be a most excellent prompt for JOURNALING. I’m in favor of journaling, no matter the form, but save every little moment in your own place too.

I’m very curious what other value people think we can get from using these platforms while we haven’t yet successfully destroyed them (trust that we will, oh yes, they are nothing but paper tigers, every one of them).

Microblog:: https://micro.zachphillips.blog/2021/02/03/intro-to-the.html

Summary

I wrote about a way that I externalize communication around the creative process.

After a dozen years working on creative ideas for people who don’t think they’re creative (and corporations), I want to share a heuristic I’ve found useful both to come up with good concepts and to communicate their relative strengths to others.

I call it the Original Recipe™. 👇

A big challenge in creative work is that good ideas come from a free-flowing, open process of linking together disparate things from vast oceans of experience, but in the end you need to choose ONE to actually do.

When there’s pressure/money on the line, this can be stressful.

Stressful for creative professionals because while they’ve learned to trust intuition more than the average bear, are they SURE this is the idea to go with?

Stressful for customers because they don’t have the expertise. The Creative Process is a Scarymagic Black Box to them.

Many a Silicon Valley robot-person has claimed to have solved this with TESTING. “Intuition is for animals! Nothing is real until they’ve clicked the red (blue, wait no, green) button!”

But are they testing infinite ideas? No. Someone still needed to choose which ideas to test.

I didn’t make up the Original Recipe™ process as a marketing gimmick*. It’s really just a way of writing down the process I’ve been doing since the beginning, unconsciously**.

• this is half true

** this is completely true

Disclaimer #1: While KFC’s Original Recipe is a registered trademark in the taste-engineering Big Food market, it is not yet registered in creative products.

Disclaimer #2: I often put ™s on things as a joke* /nods gravely with eyes wide open/

• totally not a joke at all

Here’s how the Original Recipe™ process works: As you evaluate ideas (some can do this during brainstorming, most should wait until after), assign a number from 1 to 10 for each of these five “Core Ingredients” of effective story:

Purpose

Authenticity

Conflict

Spectacle

Novelty

The next step is to assign a number for up to five additional Custom Ingredients. These should come from your project’s objectives. Is one of your goals to look modern and high-tech? Add a Sophistication ingredient and judge each concept accordingly.

While the Original Recipe™ process was conceived by a filmmaker, it applies to any task that requires creative storytelling.

The goal is to get as many and as much of these ingredients into your concepts as you can, and the winning concept should have a scrumptious combination.

You will discover that when you optimize for one ingredient, it always affects the others. If you enhance Spectacle (beauty, bigness), it will affect Authenticity (these guys are trying too hard).

While each of the ingredients can have an equal effect on the success of the idea, the absence of any one of them can kill your story completely (meaning no one will care about your story, at all).

This is the first of several posts on this topic. I’ll go into each of the Core Ingredients in-depth.

If you need a cool idea, the Original Recipe™ process can help you improve your ideas, communicate them to all types of people, and choose The One.

Send any questions you have.

If you’re looking for a creative production house to help you come up with a cool story, my company (https://shortorder.co) has an excellent staff of creative folks who come up with Purposeful, Authentic, Interesting, Spectacular, Novel ideas every day.

Microblog:: https://micro.zachphillips.blog/2021/02/02/home-movies-in.html

Summary

I wrote about home movies in the age of the iPhone, about the irony of how we all have great cameras now but we don’t make home movies half as good as we made when we were shooting on very bad, big, and clunky VHS technology.

The quality of old home movies is more than nostalgia. The constraints of the capture media, VHS and 8mm, forced us to create and “publish” individual documents.

The blessing of unconstrained high-quality cameras in our pockets comes with a significant curse. 👇

For many of us, and particularly those of us with children, our camera rolls are sources of anxiety. We know we have so many lovely moments, but:

1. There are too many of them to look through

2. They can only be enjoyed one at a time

3. Surely, some moments are lost forever

For those of us with old VHS/super8 home movies, beyond the task of getting them preserved in digital form, they have NEVER been sources of anxiety. We love them each in their own unedited (but time-limited) way.

How can we recreate these critical constraints in the iPhone age?

The first method is available only to (psycho) pros and hobbyists (psychos like me): Actually shoot film. Or, in the absence of film, get a camera like the OG Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera (the little small one) or, even better, a Digital Bolex D16.

The battery life on the BMPCC OG is so bad that you find yourself incredibly selective about what you shoot. And the file sizes from the Digital Bolex are SO BIG that you’re equally selective about when to pull the trigger.

But regular people aren’t going to use these cameras.

The option of letting the AI in your phone put together little “memories” for you is pretty lame if you ask me. There might be moments of magic, but listening to Muzak with the occasional random shot of a Diet Coke can is hardly a special experience.

The last option is to really shoot an experience with your phone, for just 15-30 minutes. Move. Get close-ups. Wide shots. Hold for reactions. Stay with the shot. Get CLOSE.

Then pick a favorite song that goes with the experience, and cut it down to the length of that song.

“Wait, EDIT, you say? Don’t get crazy now… We never EDITED our Super8 and VHS!” That’s true, but unfortunately, unless you’re willing to become an enthusiast (psycho) like me, you’re stuck with your totally unconstrained phone that makes individual clips.

Throw the song on a timeline, drag the clips in from Photos, trim those suckers until they fit the length of the song, DONE: You’ve got a nice little fully-encapsulated memory document, dare I say BETTER than our old VHS tapes (but maybe still not as good as those Super8 reels).

You can learn to do an edit like this really, really quickly. I made the video here in less than 30 minutes (but I, importantly, only shot for 7 minutes).

This linked thread has a whole bunch of examples that I’ve shot on actual 16mm film, but when we went to spread my wife’s grandmother’s ashes in the San Francisco Bay, I done forgot my Bolex, and all I had was my iPhone. Here’s what I got:

It’s one of the great ironies that now that we all have incredible, 4K cameras in our pockets, no one actually makes any home movies anymore. Let’s bring back home movies.

And for God’s sake, make sure you’re shooting at 24 frames per second.

Microblog:: https://micro.zachphillips.blog/2021/02/01/inbox-zero-sickness.html

Summary

I wrote about my decade+ experience with Inbox Zero (and Inbox Zero Sickness) and the first tool I found that helps avoid the avoidance behavior of getting to Inbox Zero…

Inbox Zero is a sound concept, but even the term’s coiner (@hotdogsladies) came to learn that when Inbox Zero becomes the end itself, it’s just an avoidance behavior.

My inbox has hit zero every day for 10+ years… I’ve spent far more attention on it than is helpful. 👇

Even good habits can become unhealthy.

If I look for the device I’ve used most often to avoid an uncomfortable feeling, a difficult problem I needed to solve, or an important bit of work that felt heavy… it wasn’t video games or eating… it was clearing out my inbox.

Getting to a clear inbox makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something. And in a way, I have. Not anything important or even urgent, nothing that gives me real satisfaction, but hey, no one can say they never got an email back from me!

That’s something, right?!

One problem with habits that are deeply ingrained is that it’s very difficult to trick your way past them. There’s an entire category of “productivity” tools that attempt to control the compulsion to check inboxes by cutting off the Internet, or certain parts of the Internet.

Over the years, I’ve tried all of the apps that cut off your access to email for a time, but here’s the problem: There’s ALWAYS a way around them. And that inbox is enticing…

The first tool I ever found that actually works is @Mailman_HQ, which I’ve been using for many months.

Mailman has several features, but the revolutionary one that addresses a core problem with how the world uses email (and what exacerbates so much Inbox Sickness) is that it can deliver email on a schedule, like a Mail(person)man.

I have my email delivered at noon and 4:30pm.

But what about cheating with @Mailman_HQ? Can’t you just look ahead to see what’s lurking in the inbox ahead of delivery time?

Of course! But here’s the thing: You can’t PROCESS those emails to Inbox Zero. They hang out in archive until delivered.

This short-circuited my habit.

There’s still a tendency to check things when there’s anxiety about something hard (or usually when I’m applying stupid pressure on myself), but with @Mailman_HQ, I can take that glance but I can’t DO anything until later, so I can get back to my task rather than get lost.

If you don’t know what Inbox Zero is, God bless. I used to think you were living like an animal (and part of me still thinks that), but if you’re happy and your messy inbox doesn’t jam you up… I’m certain my Inbox Zero has taken more bandwidth than any background mess ever could.